The field of the invention relates generally to monitoring and sampling data, and more particularly to methods and systems for use in online monitoring using a variable data sampling rate.
Known methods of monitoring physical environments may include monitoring data received from physical environments and components of physical environments. Physical environments may include physical machines, physical systems, or combinations thereof. Received data may come in a variety of forms including scalar data, wave form data, and object-based data. In some cases, particularly wave form data, receiving such data may require significant resources, especially computational, storage, and network resources. Further, in some cases a monitored physical environment may have many independent components which are being monitored. Thus, in such cases, complete monitoring of all received data may be a significant burden on the system by straining resources including computational resources and networking resources.
Many known methods to resolve this complexity involve the use of sampling methods. In such known methods, sampling involves taking a fraction of received data and thereby reducing the burden on system resources. Such sampling introduces an additional complexity, however, by reducing or impacting the responsiveness of a monitoring system to a change in state of the physical environment. If a sampling rate is set infrequently, a change in state may be detected slowly and accordingly, responded to slowly.